Adobe Labs has been offering a 64-bit Flash plugin since Dec 12, 2008. Be sure to first uninstall any other versions of Flash you have installed on the system. Then, download and unpack the 64-bit Flash Plugin for Linux into your Mozilla Plugins folder. For updates and details, visit the Adobe Labs Download page for Flash: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

iTunes for Windows XP can be run on Fedora 9 using Wine, an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and OpenGL. Please note that iTunes runs a bit slow over Wine and I have yet to test an iPhone or iPod with this configuration.

Irssi
Irssi is the self proclaimed client of the future and my favorite IRC client. Irssi is a terminal based, feature-rich, highly configurable, themed environment with support for Perl scripts. The project website hosts a large variety of themes and scripts that can be used with Irssi.

Pidgin
Pidgin is a Gnome based, multi-protocol Instant Messaging client with support for IRC.. With Pidgin, you can manage your instant messaging accounts and IRC connections with one, graphical client.

Do you want to catch control-c keyboard interrupts in your Bash program? Use the Bash builtin trap command to catch system signals. The following runs control_c() when a user interrupts the main() section with a Control-C (SIGINT).

The Bash & (ampersand) is a builtin control operator used to fork processes. From the Bash man page, “If a command is terminated by the control operator &, the shell executes the command in the background in a subshell”.

If logged into an interactive shell, the process is assigned a job number and the child PID is displayed. The job number below is one.

bash$ sleep 30 &
[1] 3586

Note that when a process is forked, the child PID is stored in the special variable $!